Manipulate and analyze big data with the full expression power of Rax - Relational Algebra with eXtensions.

Database vendors understand that SQL, while great for simple queries, is not a good enough interface for complex analytics. Here at Rax'db we would say: use Rax :-). Since R so popular among data scientists, though, many database vendors attempt to somehow integrate R into their technology. This post is… Read more →

A common problem in web analytics is sessionization or session reconstruction: taking a series of user events and splitting the series into a set of sessions [1]. Often, it is done based solely on the timestamps of the events: a session ends after a certain time of user inactivity. As… Read more →

Snowflake Computing has recently emerged from stealth with a bold claim of having reinvented the data warehouse. Ease of use is their main motto and I dare to say they live up to this promise. Since one of Snowflake's co-founders, Marcin Żukowski, is a good friend of mine, I've got… Read more →

Putting into words when something will happen is easier than calculating it. This is nothing new. Since 325 CE, Christian Easter falls on "the Sunday after the ecclesiastical full moon." Easy words for hard numbers. Even "next business day shipping " can be hard to crunch. To a human it is… Read more →

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (or principle of linguistic relativity) holds that language affects its speakers cognitive process and world view (neo-Whorfianism). Some hold this true even for programming languages, assuming coding in some language implies thinking in that language. K.E. Iverson, inventor of APL, argued that more powerful notations aided… Read more →